Squarespace vs Shopify: Which Platform Is Right for You?

Squarespace and Shopify both let you build a good looking site and sell online, but they start from different places. Shopify is a commerce platform first. Squarespace is a website builder that now includes a capable store on every plan. The right choice depends on how central selling is to your business and how far you expect it to grow.

As a Shopify agency we have moved merchants from Squarespace to Shopify, and we have also told businesses to stay put when Squarespace suited them better. This comparison uses current UK prices and each platform's own documentation, and it corrects several claims that still circulate about both.

Quick Answer

Choose Shopify if selling products is the main job of your website and you plan to grow into more products, channels, countries or wholesale. Choose Squarespace if your site is mainly about content, services or a portfolio and the shop is a smaller part of it. Squarespace is slightly cheaper to start (Core costs £17 a month billed yearly against £19 for Shopify Basic), but Shopify offers far more commerce depth as you scale.

Key Takeaways

• Both now sell on every plan. Squarespace's cheapest plan includes products, subscriptions, abandoned checkout recovery and customer accounts, but charges a 2% fee on sales.
• Entry prices are close. Squarespace Core is £17 a month billed yearly with no platform fee on store sales; Shopify Basic is £19 with no platform fee when you use Shopify Payments.
• Shopify goes much deeper on commerce. Up to 2,048 variants per product, B2B features on every plan, multiple locations and a far larger app ecosystem.
• Squarespace leads on design simplicity. Its templates and editor remain the easier route to a polished content site.
• Some old claims are wrong. Squarespace does have an extensions marketplace, and widely quoted Shopify checkout and speed figures have no published source.
• Growth is the usual reason to switch. Of our clients who moved from Squarespace, 85% did so because their store had outgrown its ecommerce tools.

Table of Contents

1. Squarespace vs Shopify at a glance
2. Pricing and fees in the UK
3. Ease of use
4. Design and templates
5. Ecommerce features
6. Apps and integrations
7. Payments and checkout
8. SEO and site speed
9. Scaling and selling internationally
10. When Squarespace is the better choice
11. When Shopify is the better choice
12. Moving from Squarespace to Shopify
13. The Why Matters Perspective
14. FAQ
15. Final Thoughts
16. Related Articles

Squarespace vs Shopify at a Glance

Pricing and Fees in the UK

Both platforms publish UK prices, and both charge less if you pay yearly. The figures below cover the platform only; card processing fees apply on top with either.

Sources: the Squarespace pricing page and Shopify UK pricing page, as shown to UK visitors in September 2026. Paying monthly costs more on both: Shopify Basic is £25, Grow £65 and Advanced £344 a month on monthly billing, and Squarespace says paying annually saves up to 36%. Shopify Plus starts from £1,800 a month. Squarespace also charges a fee on digital products and memberships of 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus and nothing on Advanced, according to its plan guide.

Three pieces of arithmetic matter more than the headline prices:

• Squarespace Basic stops being the cheapest option quickly. Its 2% fee on £1,000 of monthly sales is £20, taking the plan to £32 a month against £17 on Core. Core becomes cheaper once sales pass £250 a month, because that is where 2% equals the £5 difference.
• Core against Shopify Basic is a £2 gap. Billed yearly, Squarespace Core at £17 is £2 a month cheaper than Shopify Basic at £19, and neither charges a platform fee on store sales if you use Shopify Payments on Shopify.
• Shopify's platform fee only appears with other gateways. If you take payments through a third party provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. Shopify's own online card rate on Basic is 2% plus 25p; compare that with whichever processor you would use on Squarespace.

Squarespace offers 14 days free, Shopify offers a free trial of its own, and Shopify also lets you install and fully customise a premium theme before you pay for it. For a full breakdown of what a Shopify build costs beyond the plan, see our guide to the cost of building a Shopify store.

Ease of Use

Both platforms are built for non technical owners. Squarespace's editor feels like designing a page: you drag sections and blocks into place and see the result immediately. Shopify's admin is more structured and walks you through products, collections, shipping, payments and checkout, so the store is operationally complete before launch.

In our experience the learning curve is similar. The difference is what each makes easy: Squarespace makes beautiful pages easy, while Shopify makes running a store easy. Our Shopify store setup guide shows what that process involves.

Design and Templates

Squarespace's templates remain its strongest selling point. They are consistent, image led and hard to make look bad, which suits photographers, restaurants, studios and service businesses.

Shopify's themes are built around product discovery and checkout. The Shopify Theme Store lists roughly two dozen free themes, and premium themes commonly cost $250 to $500, or about £185 to £370. Shopify's current free themes are strong enough for most new stores, and a custom theme can match Squarespace for visual impact when the brand needs it. Our guide to choosing a Shopify theme covers the options, and our Shopify designers build bespoke themes.

Ecommerce Features

Squarespace's store is more capable than many comparisons suggest. Every current plan can sell unlimited products and subscription products, recover abandoned checkouts, collect customer reviews, run customer accounts and sync products to Facebook and Instagram. Core adds Google Shopping, shipping labels, carrier calculated shipping, automatic discounts, product waitlists and commerce analytics.

Shopify's advantage is depth, and it shows as a business grows:

• Catalogue size. Shopify allows up to 2,048 variants per product on every plan, with up to three options per product.
• Inventory. Stock can be tracked across several locations, including shops and warehouses.
• Wholesale. Shopify's B2B features, including company accounts, catalogues, quantity rules and payment terms, now run on Basic, Grow and Advanced as well as Plus, with extra options on Plus.
• Selling in person. Shopify POS shares inventory, customers and orders with the online store.
• Selling across channels. Shopify has sales channel apps for social platforms, Google and marketplaces, all managed from one admin.
• Subscriptions. Shopify's free Shopify Subscriptions app covers straightforward plans, and dedicated apps such as Recharge add richer portals and retention tools. Our guide to adding subscriptions to Shopify explains the choice.

Apps and Integrations

Squarespace does have a marketplace. Squarespace Extensions offers third party add ons, and Core and above include built in integrations such as Mailchimp and Zapier, plus connections to outside commerce systems. For a content led site with a modest shop, that is often enough.

Shopify's App Store is far larger and more commerce specific, covering email marketing, reviews, loyalty, subscriptions, bundles, search, translation, fulfilment and customer service. Most specialist ecommerce software builds for Shopify first. We are a Klaviyo Partner, and Klaviyo's Shopify integration is a good example of that depth: behaviour based email and SMS flows that are much harder to reproduce on a website builder.

The practical test is simple. List the tools you expect to need in two years, then check whether each has a native integration with the platform you are considering.

Payments and Checkout

Shopify's checkout is hosted and maintained by Shopify, with Shopify Payments, Shop Pay for returning shoppers, and wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. You can also connect third party payment providers, subject to the extra platform fee described above.

Squarespace sites take payments through Squarespace Payments where it is available, or through Stripe and PayPal. Squarespace lowers its own processing rate on the Plus and Advanced plans.

You will see claims that Shopify's checkout converts far above the industry average. We could not find a published source for the figures quoted, so we do not repeat them. Test checkout changes on your own store, and see our guide to increasing Shopify conversions for the levers that matter.

SEO and Site Speed

Both platforms cover the SEO basics: editable titles and descriptions, clean URLs, XML sitemaps, image alt text and redirects. Squarespace's blogging tools are polished, and Shopify's blog is functional rather than rich, although content can still rank well on either.

Speed depends more on the theme, images and apps you add than on the platform itself. Average load times quoted for all Shopify stores have no published source, so ignore them and measure your own Core Web Vitals, the loading, responsiveness and layout stability scores Google uses. Our article on why the Shopify speed score misleads explains what to measure, and our Shopify SEO guide covers the rest.

Scaling and Selling Internationally

Shopify is built to grow on one platform, from Basic through Grow and Advanced to Plus, with Shopify Markets for selling in several countries, currencies and languages from one store. Large catalogues, wholesale, several locations and high order volumes are all normal on Shopify.

Squarespace handles small and medium stores well, but brands with big catalogues, complex inventory, wholesale or several markets usually reach its limits. Moving platform later costs time and money, so factor your two year plan into the decision now.

When Squarespace Is the Better Choice

Squarespace is usually the stronger option when:

• Your site is mainly content, services or a portfolio, and selling is a smaller part of the business.
• Your product range is small and simple, without wholesale, several locations or complex variants.
• Design is the priority and you want a polished site without custom development.
• Blogging, bookings or memberships matter as much as the shop.
• You do not expect complex commerce needs in the next two to three years.

When Shopify Is the Better Choice

Shopify is usually the stronger option when:

• Selling products is the main purpose of the website.
• You plan to grow your range, traffic, channels or countries.
• You need specialist apps for email, reviews, loyalty, subscriptions or bundles.
• You sell wholesale or in person as well as online.
• You want one platform from launch to enterprise, without a forced migration later.

For a wider view, see why we build on Shopify and our comparisons of WooCommerce and Wix with Shopify.

Moving from Squarespace to Shopify

If your store has outgrown Squarespace, moving to Shopify is well established. Plan it in this order: export products and customers, map every old URL to its new address, set up the theme, connect apps and payments, then test orders, emails and redirects before switching the domain.

Redirects are where migrations most often go wrong: without a complete redirect map, the rankings and backlinks built on your old URLs are lost. Our Shopify migration checklist covers every step, and our guide to migration costs sets out what to budget.

The Why Matters Perspective

Squarespace is an excellent platform for what it was designed to do, and we do not recommend leaving it unless your commerce needs have genuinely outgrown it. Our own data shows how often that happens: of our clients who moved from Squarespace, 85% did so because their online store had outgrown Squarespace's ecommerce tools and they needed more advanced features to scale their sales.

The mistake we see most often is a product business choosing Squarespace for its templates, then discovering a year later that it needs wholesale, several locations, a loyalty programme or deeper email automation.

As a Shopify Select partner, we would rather help you choose correctly once. Our pricing is published on our website, retainer clients are not tied into long contracts, and every development project carries our three month guarantee.

FAQ

Is Squarespace cheaper than Shopify?

At entry level, slightly. Billed yearly in the UK, Squarespace Core costs £17 a month and Shopify Basic £19, and neither takes a platform fee on store sales if you use Shopify Payments. Squarespace Basic costs £12 but charges 2% on sales, so it costs more than Core once sales pass about £250 a month, and more than Shopify Basic above about £350.

Does Squarespace charge transaction fees?

Only on its Basic plan, which takes 2% of commerce sales. Core, Plus and Advanced charge no commerce transaction fee, although digital products and memberships carry a fee of 7% on Basic, 5% on Core and 1% on Plus. Card processing fees apply on every plan.

Does Squarespace have an app store?

Yes. Squarespace Extensions is a marketplace of third party add ons, and Core and above include integrations such as Mailchimp and Zapier. It is much smaller than the Shopify App Store, which remains the larger ecosystem for ecommerce tools.

Is Shopify better than Squarespace for SEO?

Both cover the SEO essentials, including editable titles, clean URLs, sitemaps and redirects. Squarespace has slightly more polished blogging tools, while Shopify suits large product catalogues. Site speed depends mostly on your theme, images and apps, so measure your own Core Web Vitals.

Can I move from Squarespace to Shopify?

Yes. Products, customers and content can be moved, and 301 redirects from every old URL protect your rankings. Build the redirect map before launch, test orders and emails, and only then switch the domain.

Which is better for a small online shop?

For a service business or portfolio selling a few items, Squarespace is often the better fit. For a product business, even a small one, Shopify usually wins because it grows with you without a platform change later.

Final Thoughts

The Squarespace vs Shopify decision comes down to one question: is your website mainly about selling products, or is selling one part of a broader site? If selling is the core, Shopify's depth, ecosystem and room to grow make it the stronger choice. If the site is mainly content or services with a small shop, Squarespace's design tools and simplicity are hard to beat. Both are good platforms; the mistake is choosing one for the job the other does best.

Related Articles

• WooCommerce vs Shopify: An Honest Comparison
• Wix vs Shopify: Which Platform Is Best for Your Online Store?
• How Much Does It Cost to Build a Shopify Store? A Transparent Guide
• How to Set Up a Shopify Store: A Step by Step Agency Guide
• The Complete Shopify Migration Checklist: Before, During and After
• How to Choose the Right Shopify Theme for Your Business
• How to Optimise Your Shopify Store for SEO